Wikipedia meets The Economist
The Economist, in its January 1 - 7, 2005 edition, cited Wikipedia as a reference in a chart entitled “From ants to atoms” (which compared the size of things in nanometers). As an occasional Wikipedia contributor and an enthusiast of the Wikipedia concept, and as a long-time Economist junkie, I was chuffed.
It brought to mind, however, the ongoing debate regarding the credibility of Wikipedia. The pot was most recently stirred by Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, in A Personal Statement about Wikipedia’s Reliability. Sanger believes that Wikipedia should “fork”, so that the publicly-contributed content is separated from content reviewed and approved by academics and subject-matter experts.
Fair enough. Wikipedia is not unaware of the problem - it has a prominent General Disclaimer that reads: “WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY”. Credible, academic peer-reviewed content is a GT. But I hope the solution lies in “one and the other” instead of “one or the other.”
Wikipedia is an example of what happens when Ideal meets Reality. Marx-Engels communism versus Soviet totalitarianism; the United Nations in 1945 versus the UN in 2005. Wikipedia is one of these big ideas that would probably work really well if people were good and rational, whatever those terms mean, but that struggle because enough people are not good and rational, or at least not good and rational in the way that is required to fulfil the ideal.
But one must take into account the cost of the failure of the ideal. When communism morphed from an idea about “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” to “from me the least that I can get away with, to me the most that I can grab”, millions of people died, and millions more were irrevocably damaged. When the United Nations fails because of proxy power-games and bureaucratic schlerosis and corruption, millions of people die, and millions more are irrevocably damaged. When Wikipedia fails because some goof-ball scrawls “George Bush in an a-hole”, nobody dies, or gets damaged, or even gets a failing grade on their term-paper (or, at least, not because of Wikipedia).
When The Economist uses Wikipedia as a reference, it makes a judgement about the kind of information contained in Wikipedia that is likely to be accurate. I make the same judgement when I read Time magazine. I make the same judgement on almost every web page I visit. Since the advent of the WWW and the explosion of information sources, these kinds of credibility judgements have become a life skill. They weren’t a life skill when “the news” was Walter Kronkite and the Podunk Post-Intelligencer, and when the one-stop reference was the Encyclopedia Brittanica. And it’s a BT that credibility judgements weren’t an issue earlier - the Big Lie is a lot harder to perpetrate now, from “The Heriosm of Our Boys” to “The <fill in the colour> Scourge”.
I would distrust a Wikipedia written by “experts”. For me, the whole point of Wikipedia is that it’s not written “experts” - I can get the views of experts whenever I want, from newspapers (in the realm of journalism) to academic papers (which, if they weren’t so badly written, might be more often read by non-experts). The whole point of Wikipedia is that it acknowledges that information is subjective and subject to disagreement, and that expert commentary is not the only facet of the prism of information, and that the dangers of expert commentary is that people tend to believe that it’s true, just because it’s from an Expert.
That being said, I would love an Expert Wikipedia, where there was locked, peer-reviewed content. The real Wikipedia could link to that content, using it as an adjunt. But I suspect that content on the Expert Wikipedia would be every bit as subject to pissing matches among experts as content on the current Wikipedia is subject to pissing matches among non-experts; the only difference is that the arguments on Expert Wikipedia would be a lot more obfuscatory and harder to read.